The New PayPal Mafia: 10 Interns, $100 Billion

Written by: Xiaobing
On October 19, 2026, Alexandr Wang, Meta's Chief AI Officer, posted a selfie on X with just seven words: got the HRT gang back together!

The comments section exploded.

This seemingly casual group photo hides one of the most outrageous facts in today's tech world: the three people in the photo, along with a few absent classmates, participated together in the first intern program of Hudson River Trading, a Wall Street quant trading giant, in the winter of 2015, which only recruited 10 people in total.

Ten years later, the companies founded or led by these 10 interns have a combined valuation of over $100 billion.

On the right side of the photo is Wang himself, 29 years old, founder of Scale AI, who was poached by Zuckerberg for $14.3 billion last year to serve as Chief AI Officer at Meta, steering the Meta Super Intelligence Lab.

On the left is Jeff Yan, founder of Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange built by an 11-person team without any funding, which made $900 million in profit last year, with a project valuation of up to $76 billion.

In the middle is Scott Wu, founder and CEO of Cognition, whose AI programming agent Devin is growing its enterprise clients at a rate of 50% per month, with the company's latest valuation at $48 billion.

The last time the three were in the same room together was likely that winter in 2015, in the trading firm's office by the Hudson River.

Winter by the Hudson River

The connection among these geniuses began in high school.

Jeff Yan and Scott Wu both won gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), with Wu winning three times and topping the competition in 2014 with a perfect score. Alexandr Wang was a regular at the American Computer Olympiad and Math Olympiad, and they repeatedly crossed paths at various summer camps and training teams, in a circle so small that almost everyone knew each other.

In the winter of 2015, these competition prodigies scattered across Harvard and MIT were brought together by a common name: Hudson River Trading.

HRT is one of the world's top quant trading firms, headquartered in New York, with a daily trading volume that once accounted for over 15% of the U.S. stock market.

In the winter of 2015, HRT attempted to recruit interns for the first time. The slots were extremely limited, with only 10 positions available. Jeff Yan was a junior at Harvard at the time, Scott Wu was a freshman, and Alexandr Wang was a freshman at MIT.

The design of this internship program was itself very "quantitative": lasting three weeks and conducted in a competitive format, with rankings in each round. According to Jeff Yan's later recollection, the top two in every round were always him and Scott Wu.

However, the most historically significant moment of this internship may not have been the trading competition itself. According to an in-depth interview with Jeff Yan by Colossus magazine, it was during his internship at HRT that he first heard about Bitcoin through the recommendation of two former partners. Although he did not act on it immediately, he soon found the Ethereum white paper and read a description: a computer that runs globally and cannot be shut down, that seed grew into Hyperliquid years later.

Also that winter, 19-year-old Alexandr Wang said something at his birthday party to his Harvard and MIT classmates sitting around the table, which has been quoted repeatedly:

"Why can't it be us?"

Three Paths, One Origin

After leaving HRT's office, these young people chose completely different paths. But they share a common underlying logic: reconstructing a traditional industry with algorithmic thinking.

Alexandr Wang: From Data Annotation to Zuckerberg's AI Brain

After leaving HRT, Wang made a surprising decision: to drop out of MIT.

In 2016, at the age of 19, he co-founded Scale AI with Lucy Guo, doing something that sounds unsexy: annotating training data for AI. But Wang's judgment was extremely precise: he skipped specific AI applications and directly bet on the "shovels" of the entire AI industry.

As the AI wave swept the globe, Scale AI became a core supplier for giants like OpenAI, Meta, and the U.S. Department of Defense. By 2021, the company's valuation soared to $7.3 billion, making 24-year-old Wang the youngest self-made billionaire in the world. In the 2024 funding round, Scale AI's valuation reached $13.8 billion, backed by Nvidia, Amazon, and Meta.

Then came the groundbreaking deal in June 2025 that shook Silicon Valley. Meta acquired 49% of Scale AI for $14.3 billion, with an overall valuation of $29 billion. As a core condition of the deal, Zuckerberg required Wang to join Meta as Chief AI Officer, leading the newly established "Meta Super Intelligence Lab."

A 28-year-old became the commander-in-chief of the AI strategy for the world's largest social media empire.

Jeff Yan: From Quant Trader to Builder of On-Chain Financial Infrastructure

If Wang chose the "shovel business" of AI, Jeff Yan chose the hardest path in the crypto world: rebuilding trading infrastructure.

After graduating from Harvard, Yan did not rush to start a business. He worked at Google and a self-driving company while continuously observing the crypto world. In 2020, he founded Chameleon Trading, a cryptocurrency market maker. This experience gave him a deep understanding of the structural flaws of centralized exchanges, and the collapse of FTX gave him a decisive push.

In 2022, Yan disbanded the Chameleon team and began using his own funds to build Hyperliquid, a decentralized perpetual contract exchange running on the blockchain. No VC investment, no token presale, an 11-person team starting from scratch.

This "anti-VC" path is almost unheard of in the crypto industry. Yan's confidence comes from the trading profits accumulated at Chameleon, and even more from the quant traders' relentless pursuit of product excellence: low latency, high throughput, and user experience that approaches or even surpasses centralized exchanges.

ICE's CEO Jeffrey Sprecher once stated that Hyperliquid's trading activity "exceeded that of Nasdaq."

Today, Hyperliquid is one of the most profitable companies globally. Last year, the company's 11 employees generated over $900 million in profit. Founded just four years ago, its valuation has reached $76 billion.

Scott Wu: The One Who Lets AI Write Code

Scott Wu is the most terrifying competitor among this group. Three IOI gold medals, crowned with a perfect score in 2014, MathCounts national champion, third place in Google Code Jam. After two years at Harvard, he dropped out and co-founded the AI social network platform Lunchclub.

But what truly made him famous in Silicon Valley was the founding of Cognition at the end of 2023 with Steven Hao and Walden Yan (the three collectively hold 5 IOI gold medals). In March 2024, Cognition launched Devin, touted as the "world's first AI software engineer" product, capable of independently planning, writing, testing, and deploying code.

Devin sparked huge controversy in the tech community, but the market provided its answer: Cognition's valuation skyrocketed from $350 million in early 2024 to $10.2 billion in September 2025, and then to $26 billion in May 2026 (raising $1 billion), with annual revenue soaring from $5.4 million in mid-2024 to nearly $500 million in mid-2026.

By September 2026, annual revenue was approaching $1 billion, and the latest valuation was reported to have reached $48 billion. Wu himself stated that over 90% of Cognition's internal code is now written by Devin.

A three-year-old startup, with a valuation rising from $350 million to $48 billion, an increase of over 130 times.

More Than Three People

Today, that selfie features only three people, but this circle is much larger than what a single photo can hold.

According to Scott Wu, the HRT internship program was not the starting point of this group's friendship. Many of them had already met through various Olympiad competitions in high school. And the names that extend from that small circle each occupy a place in today's tech landscape.

Jesse Zhang, one of the HRT interns. His previous social gaming company Lowkey was acquired by Niantic (the developer of Pokémon Go). In 2023, he founded Decagon, an AI customer service agent company focused on replacing enterprise customer service with AI. The company, established in less than three years, has reached a valuation of $4.5 billion, with clients including Duolingo and Hertz, and was selected for Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2026.

Johnny Ho, a three-time IOI gold medalist and Harvard alumnus. He met Scott Wu and Jeff Yan in high school. In the 2013 U.S. IOI team photo, he stood alongside Steven Hao and Scott Wu.

After leaving the competition circle, Ho worked as a quant trader at Tower Research Capital and then joined Quora as an engineer. In 2022, he co-founded the AI search engine Perplexity with Aravind Srinivas and others, currently serving as co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer. The latest funding round for Perplexity reportedly valued it at around $30 billion, redefining the trillion-dollar search engine market.

Demi Guo, a "genius girl" from Hangzhou and a silver medalist at the 2015 IOI. She holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's in computer science from Harvard and was the youngest full-time researcher at Meta AI Research. In 2023, she dropped out of a PhD program at Stanford and co-founded the AI video generation platform Pika with her classmate Chenlin Meng, reaching a valuation of $470 million and over 16 million users. She interned at HRT and Quora, also part of the same circle.

Steven Hao, a gold medalist at the 2014 IOI and a graduate of MIT's mathematics department. He was an early core engineer at Alexandr Wang's Scale AI and later joined Scott Wu's Cognition as co-founder and CTO. According to Forbes, 30-year-old Hao's net worth has reached about $1.3 billion, making him the youngest American on the 2026 Forbes 400 list.

From Hao's trajectory, one can clearly see the "talent flow" within this circle: he brought the engineering experience and understanding of AI data accumulated at Scale AI into Cognition. The three founders of Cognition, Wu, Hao, and Walden Yan, collectively hold 5 IOI gold medals, infusing the algorithmic thinking honed in competitions directly into the core architecture of the AI programming agent.

Why Did a Quant Trading Company Become a Cradle for Founders?

This is not a coincidence.

When Wang retweeted that 2015 intern group photo in early October this year, he added a comment: "HRT 2015 intern class is the new-gen PayPal Mafia."

The story of the PayPal Mafia is well-known. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, and others emerged from the same company, creating Tesla, Palantir, LinkedIn, Yammer, and defining the tech landscape of the last decade.

However, there is a fundamental difference between this group from HRT and the PayPal Mafia. The bond of the PayPal Mafia is a company and a shared entrepreneurial experience. The bond among this group from HRT is earlier and deeper; they share a way of thinking.

What does it mean to come from a competition background?

It means they have been trained since their teens to solve problems with optimal solutions, with an almost obsessive pursuit of efficiency and an intuitive understanding of complex systems. Quant trading companies are natural amplifiers of this way of thinking: at HRT, they learned how to extract signals from massive noise, how to make decisions within milliseconds, and how to build self-optimizing systems.

Jesse Zhang wrote in an article: "This generation that grew up doing math, programming, and science competitions occupies a disproportionately high share among today's founders."

Quant trading firms are the key springboard for these individuals transitioning from the competition circle to the entrepreneurial circle. Names like Jane Street, Citadel, DE Shaw, and Two Sigma all stand behind similar stories, but the concentration of the HRT 2015 class is indeed exceptionally high.

Of the 10 interns, at least 4 became unicorn founders, with a combined valuation exceeding $100 billion; this "talent conversion rate" surpasses that of tech giants like Google and Meta, known for producing AI talent.

The deeper reason may lie in the fact that these quant trading firms provide not only technical training but also an instinctive understanding of market structures. Wang applied this understanding to AI data infrastructure, Yan to on-chain financial infrastructure, Wu to software engineering automation, Zhang to customer service reconstruction, and Ho to search engine disruption.

They solve different problems, but the way they break down problems is strikingly similar: find an inefficient system and rebuild it with algorithms and engineering capabilities.

Geniuses always meet early. But the truly moving part of this story is not how smart they are. The competition gold medals have long proven their intelligence. The moving part is that the era has finally turned to the page that belongs to them.

What was the image of this group ten years ago? Math competition champions, programming geeks, invisible people in social circles. In any American high school's hierarchy of disdain, they were all categorized under the same term: nerd. That term was not a compliment for a long time; it meant quirky, uninteresting, and out of touch with the mainstream.

But the world after 2024 has given the nerds an unprecedented stage.

As AI becomes the underlying operating system for all industries, and as code itself begins to write code, those who can master all of this are precisely those who have lived in algorithms and formulas since childhood.

Wang, Yan, Wu, Zhang, Ho, Guo, Hao, these Chinese surnames that sound awkward in English, have walked from the Olympiad stage to the center of the era's stage.

Once despised nerds have finally welcomed their golden age.

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